Fatalism Vs Confucianism

There are individual and cultural differences in people 's beliefs in their own, and others, ability to avoid or control risks. Individual differences in personality and cognitive style may be reflected in people 's confidence in their ability as decision makers, their willingness to make a decision at all as opposed to procrastinating or avoiding responsibility, and how much they prefer ‘closure’ to continuing uncertainty. That is, some people may be particularly likely to turn to others to help resolve their uncertainty. Understanding who these individuals and groups are may help in designing more effective risk messages. In terms of culture, research suggests that some cultures are more fatalistic than others when it comes to natural …show more content…
Likewise, Confucianism promotes long term thinking, perseverance and the importance of preparing for future adversity and these cultural qualities may translate an implicit fatalism into a degree of preparedness. The relationship between human beings and nature may also be viewed differently within different cultures. Natural hazards and disasters highlight, often graphically, our social dependence on one another. Yet we have to start somewhere, to find some thread to pull that may disentangle part of the knot. One such thread is how we, as individuals and as members of social networks, interpret risk and act upon our interpretations.

The literature on risk interpretation and decision making is both large and diverse and covers topics ranging from public concerns about threats from natural and industrial sources to changes in industrial development or changed land use,wind farms, waste storage or incineration, commercial and housing development in rural areas. Similarly, there is a large body of work on the extent to which people feel that their health is endangered by a host of …show more content…
The first thing to appreciate is that no one criterion is any more correct than any other in an absolute sense. It all comes down to what kinds of errors we are prepared to accept and what kinds we are anxious to avoid. Ideally, we don 't want any errors, but that just amounts to saying that we aspire to a situation where we achieve perfect discrimination, in other words where information is unambiguous. In such an ideal world, we 'd have no need to choose a decision criterion since there 'd be no uncertainty. Of major importance in the choice of criterion are the anticipated costs and benefits of different decision outcomes. With natural hazards, the costs of a miss a failure to detect or predict a hazard event can be catastrophic. By itself, this should push decision makers in the direction of adopting a cautious criterion or precautionary principle, where the chance of a miss is reduced at the price of accepting more false alarms. But the costs of false alarms are not necessarily trivial either, especially if they occur repeatedly. They may induce complacency or cynicism among populations at risk if warnings of imminent disasters fail to materialism. Furthermore, preventive measures , such as an evacuation may cause disruption to normal life and economic activity. The important lesson here is that there is always a balance to be struck, and it is best if this is made explicit. We live in an